Instrument of War

Auteur

David Suisman is associate professor of history at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music, winner of numerous awards and honors, and co-editor of Capitalism and the Senses and Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Texte du rabat

"David Suisman shows that the US military has deep and multilayered investment in music. It employs thousands of musicians, whose music creates communal norms and identities. Music also helps soldiers to grapple with the realities of combat, while serving as a weapon in its own right, at places like Guantâanamo Bay. Suisman calls music "a lubricant in the gears of the American war machine," and he ably shows how its elemental qualities have been used and transformed, much as the military itself has, by technology and by changing understandings of the self. Today's soldiers may still stand for reveille, but they also cultivate Spotify lists to fly drones by"--